Having been around for all of the 90s: I was in my twenties. I really didn't care that much about the future of tech, because it was all fun and exciting. Maybe

Having been around for all of the 90s: I was in my twenties. I really didn't care that much about the future of tech, because it was all fun and exciting. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the twenties are a period of deep contemplation about long-term trends ;) The things I did see were kind of right there. You could see Linux taking shape - and the biggest driver there, IMHO, was that Unix as an OS removed a lot of constraints Windows and macOS had at the time, that Linux was free & open, and that the entire teaching environment used some form of Unix. You could see that Internet thing take shape. (I'm still cranky with myself I didn't see it enough, so I turned down several excellent startup options). A commercial future was still dubious. At least to me, but then, I'm not a futurist ;) You could believe, for a glorious moment, that open sharing was an unalloyed good, and privacy wasn't necessary. (That lasted about 18 months, but for a brief moment in time, it felt amazing) Most of us spent a lot of time making fun of early video sharing attempts, because we could do math. (Bandwidth made it impossible). We were less good in estimating how much bandwidth would increase. Also, the funniest early attempt was Oracle, because Oracle had a reputation even back then. The one thing I did "see" early on was that single-core was headed to the dustbin. Mostly because I had the fortune to work with a bunch of people who worked on transputers. A dead-end tech by itself, but it made a very clear point that networked systems of cores are extremely powerful. Looking back, what strikes me most is how little has changed. We had passionate editor wars. We had OS fanboys. We had our own overhyped and underused lazy FP language (Miranda, back then). We still applied functional principles, just not in that language. Lisp was supposed to be cool, but nobody used it. Nobody wrote FORTRAN, but we'd have been doomed without numeric libraries from FORTRAN. C (and figments of C++) were the workhorse for heavy tasks. The lighter lifting, you did in a scripting language (Perl), because ain't nobody got time for C++. GUIs were derided as fat and bloated, and people in general clamored for the good old times of fast and light software. Programs were at the outer limit of complexity we could manage.